The John McClaughrys are really an unfortunate distraction from our dealing seriously with accelerating climate change. While many of the spokesmen for right-wing “think tanks” like the Ethan Allen Institute are funded by coal and petroleum industry magnates like the Koch brothers, let’s give John the benefit of the doubt and assume that his climate change denialism is due to ideological blinders.

John’s latest intervention is to cite the authority of two discredited Alabama scientists, Roy Spencer and John Christie, as proving that human-caused climate change is not a serious problem. Any reader wishing to bother would find ample evidence online from the climate science profession disproving Spencer and Christie’s hypotheses.

Where is Spencer coming from? Spencer is a signatory to An Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which states that “Earth and its ecosystems — created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence — are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting.”

In his book “The Evolution Crisis,” Spencer wrote, “I finally became convinced that the theory of creation actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution.”

Let’s not let debate with the John McClaughrys distract us from the more serious problems that we have with a Democratic administration that acknowledges climate change while actually embracing policies that are accelerating global warming — or for that matter the Shumlin administration that supports false solutions like expanding infrastructure for fracked natural gas, causing a sharp rise in methane leaks which are up to 105 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas.